Metaphorosis November 2018

By Saleha Chowdhury and Metaphorosis Magazine

Beautifully written speculative fiction from Metaphorosis magazine.

All the stories from the month, plus author biographies, interviews, and story origins.

Table of Contents

• The Little G-d of Łódź — Evan Marcroft
• A House on the Volga — Filip Wiltgren

• Language: English
• Publisher: Metaphorosis Magazine
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640761209

Book preview

Metaphorosis

November 2018

edited by

B. Morris Allen

ISSN: 2573-136X (online)

ISBN: 978-1-64076-108-120-9 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-64076-109-121-6 (paperback)

Metaphorosis Publishing logo

Metaphorosis

Neskowin

Table of Contents

Metaphorosis

November 2018

The Little G-d of Łódź

A House on the Volga

When the Last Friend is Gone

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry and I Love You

Graveyard

Copyright

Metaphorosis magazine

Metaphorosis Publishing

November 2018

The Little G-d of Łódź — Evan Marcroft

A House on the Volga — Filip Wiltgren

When the Last Friend is Gone — Tris Matthews

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry, and I Love You — L'Erin Ogle

Graveyard — Arlen Feldman

The Little G-d of Łódź

Evan Marcroft

On September 6, 1939, a Rabbi and Kabbalist named Yitzchok Falk sets fire to the Great Synagogue of Łódź. The Germans will burn it anyway, he tells his apprentice they drag a body out of the trunk of his car. Let it burn without victims, and for a good reason. The boy, Max, who holds the feet, only nods.

They carry the body in and lay it out in the prayer hall. It is a young man near Max’s thirteen years and fifty seven kilos, dressed in his clothes. He died of a broken neck, not of their doing, and was obtained at great cost. From his coat the rabbi produces a rag-corked bottle and a heavy black key, the latter of which he presses into his apprentice’s hand. Everything is yours now, he tells the boy. Do with it what you will, if you will good. But your life has become a precious resource. Keep it from those who want it and give it to those who need it. His voice breaks under the weight of emotion. Do not loathe those who loathe you. Just live, Max. We are Jews; we know dark times will pass.

Max buries the key in his fist, but only nods.

He stays long enough to help his adopted father start the fire, touching flame to the parched books in the study hall, dousing the holy ark in petrol. He finds that a Torah scroll smolders with the same smell as any other paper. He escapes as the flames begin to creep towards the rafters, leaving his master to his last act of charity. The gunshot is a raindrop amidst a downpour.

Max flies through cobbled streets until it is safe to stop and catch his breath. Only then does he crumple up and discard his master’s final words. There is no room left in his heart for them, for with apologies it is already so full of bile and venom and hate.

The key opens the hidden lock of a secret room in his master’s house. There, where by lamplight Rabbi Falk taught him of the sefirot and the boustrophedontic Folded Name of G-d, are kept many tomes of ancient Tradition. The Sodei Razayya, the Sefer Yetzirah, and others more arcane still, illuminated ledgers of demons and angels, books of power, all disguised cleverly in the bindings of Christian bibles. Max takes them all.

The Germans will roll over this place in a matter of days and pave everything, stone and knowledge alike, into a road going east. Same as the synagogue, which would have burned tomorrow if not today. In boot tread and tank tread they will track all that is jude across Poland until there is only dust left of it.

But Max knows well there is power in dust.

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Seven months later, in the spring of 1940, Max has a new family. The rabbi, ever prescient, made the arrangements for him well before he falsified Max’s death. He has a new name; rest in peace, Max Steinberg, and welcome back from abroad cousin Oskar Kac. His aunt and uncle are Monica and Dieter, his little blonde cousin Else, and they live together in a modest house in the Sródmiescie district. They are ethnic German—happily registered Volksdeutsche—and they are Christians. Max could not ask for a better place to hide.

It is easy to be Oskar the Christian. In some ways it is an easier life than Max the judenschwein. The facets of the faith are not so different from his own. A crucifix is not the worst thing that can be tied around one’s neck. His false family are Jewish sympathizers, educated people, and they are very kind to him. They have made sure he is comfortable in their cellar and allow him to eat supper with them. Little Else in particular is a blessing. She is a dim but charming girl who is happy to help Max fill the empty hours when it is too risky to be outside.

And yes, his features are Aryan enough that he can even walk about in broad daylight, so long as he carries his forged papers like he would clutch shut an open wound.

Max may walk free, but he has not escaped the ghetto. Is he supposed to not hear it when the Orpo executes men and women in the streets, or smell the bodies strung up until they rot free of the rope? That pigpen between Inflancka and Drewnoska Street is where his kind is deemed to belong, and at all times he feels its subtle gravity threatening to draw him in if he is not absolutely vigilant.

Yet he is there, watching from the crowd, as the wall is put up around the ghetto. The barrier is a flimsy thing, green wood garnished with barbed wire. The weight of all the bodies behind it would easily bowl it over. And why don’t they? There must be thousands of them cramped into a tenth as many rooms turned cells. A universe of yellow stars. The few Germans who strut to and fro outside the fence would be drowned in them.

But those hot, fresh first days where anything could still have happened mature into weeks. More Jews are shipped in from outside the city and poured into the ghetto. What keeps it from rupturing like a full bladder, Max does not know—the Germans are geniuses in the science of cruelty. And still, he watches its occupants shuffle a little closer together, tromping in their own overflowing feces, making room.

They do not fear the Nazis, he has come to believe.

Not as much as they fear their sharp-edged eye. The eye that flutters from every storefront, that lolls from every shattered window. Bloodshot, lidless, its pupil a black windmill slashed into a cataracted iris, glowering over all. When the Orpo is gone, the eye observes. They call it the Hakenkreuz, though Max knows of many other names. The symbol came from somewhere in the Orient. India perhaps. It had meant only good things once, to many peoples, but the Germans can corrupt even the intangible, bend good to the work of evil.

In their hands it has become a lens for something to peer balefully through. Something that loathes the Jew and gluts on their suffering. Max knows not what name to call the entity. But whenever its indentured eye meets his, Max refuses to look away. Does the thing behind the swastika see the truth of him? Let it. Those trapped in the ghetto may be powerless before it, but he is not.

He has dirt, and a word.

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In the cellar of the Kac house, Max is making a golem.

For the last several months he has scavenged and saved to purchase its components: Lengths of stiff wire, for structure; basic sculpting tools; eighty kilograms of clay in blocks. Concealing it all from the Kacs was a chore. Sculpting it by hand, by himself, in a night, is even harder.

Max misses the old rabbi sorely. This task is too much for